[darkmirage]

Aaron was smart to recognize that Dropbox had the first-mover brand recognition among consumers that is hard to overcome and therefore deliberately chose to focus on enterprise deals. This seems to be paying off for Box. For example, as a Stanford student, we all get 30 GB of free Box space associated with our .edu addresses.

However, I wouldn't write off Dropbox. The flipside of this is that no one at Stanford actually use the Box space that the university has seen fit to pay for. Consumer mindshare is a powerful tool. Think of how a few years ago people were saying that the iPhone would never be allowed in the corporate world because it was not designed for the enterprise.

When it comes to enterprise file-syncing, I see Box as a top-down approach and Dropbox as a bottom-up approach. Box has the lead now but it's a perilous one.

[ghayes]

As Box was around before Dropbox, how do you say that Dropbox had a "the first-mover brand recognition"?

Do you mean that DropBox had a higher market share of consumers, and so, decided to push toward SMB and Enterprise? In that way, yes, it seems to have been a good strategy.

[pmorici]

I've known about Dropbox for years I just heard of Box in the past several months and when I went to look at the company history on Wikipedia I was very surprised to find Box had been around a lot longer. Not sure if my experience is common but It think that is what the OP is talking about in general.

[pbhjpbhj]

Same for me in the UK; but corp seems to be where the money is made so no great surprise.

[argumentum]

What makes you say Box has the lead?

[stevewilhelm]

We had been using Dropbox, but have switched to Google Drive; works well enough with the rest of the Google Apps suite.